Special News Series: Rising Up For Justice! – Breonna Taylor’s Family to Receive $12M Settlement From Louisville

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Breonna Taylor’s Family to Receive $12 Million Settlement From City of Louisville

By Rukmini Callimachi, New York Times

September 15, 2020

In the aftermath of the botched police raid in which Ms. Taylor was killed, the city also agreed to institute changes aimed at preventing future deaths by officers.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — After months of protests that turned Breonna Taylor’s name into a national slogan against police violence, city officials agreed to pay her family $12 million and institute changes aimed at preventing future deaths by officers.

The agreement, announced Tuesday, settled a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by the young woman’s family. As her mother, her lawyers and leading activists walked into the council chamber alongside the mayor, there was a momentary show of unity, after months of nightly, sometimes violent demonstrations that have left Kentucky’s largest city boarded up. It comes six months after the death of Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, in a botched drug raid, but before the state’s attorney general has said whether the officers involved in the shooting would be criminally charged — a key demand of protesters.

“My administration is not waiting to move ahead with needed reforms to prevent a tragedy like this from ever happening again,” Mayor Greg Fischer said. “When you know what the right thing to do is you do it. Why wait?”

The agreement, which did not require the city to acknowledge wrongdoing, was sizable, with her family receiving more than double the amount paid to the relatives of Eric Garner, the New York man who died in a police chokehold in 2014. While a few similar cases resulted in larger payments, from $13 million to a whopping $38 million, some of them came only after years in court battles. By contrast, the Louisville agreement was reached in just months.

Most of all, it was unusual because of the range of changes — a dozen in all — that the embattled city agreed to adopt in an effort to quell the protests….

The policing changes would require more oversight by top commanders, and make mandatory safeguards that were common practice in the department but were not followed the night of the March 13 raid. They would also put in place an early warning system to flag officers who have been accused of excessive force….

Read the full article here.

More Breaking News here.

More about Breonna Taylor’s killing here.